PSYCHOLOGY AND POLITICS IN FRANCE, 1789-1851: THE INFLUENCE OF MEDICAL PSYCHOLOGY ON THE POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES OF FRANCOIS GUIZOT, LOUIS BLANC, AND JULES MICHELE

During the first half of the nineteenth century, French alienists developed psychological diagnoses and treatments for insanity that were based primarily on medical rather than philosophical observations. Philippe Pinel and his followers supposedly discovered psychological laws that governed man's behavior, just as Isaac Newton had earlier found physical laws of the universe. As Michel Foucault demonstrated recently, in his Histoire de la folie a l'age classique, this scientific explanation for insanity was used to label and control deviants. In their major works, Francois Guizot, Louis Blanc and Jules Michelet reveal that they employed psychology to justify programs to condemn opposition.;Guizot presented the Orleanist expansion of government as a psychological therapy for the masses whose passions had been aroused. In order to control citizens' ideas, he modeled primary schools and censorship on treatment originally devised for the hospitalized patient. Guizot's refusal to extend suffrage was also based on medical assumptions, since he identified the people's demand for political liberty with the monomaniacal obsession of such a patient to gain freedom before he had been cured.;In contrast, Blanc relied on a physical treatment that was identified with economic revolution in order to cure society's ills. Alienists' writings demonstrate, however, that medical support for physical treatments, such as bleedings and purgatives, was outdated by the 1840's. Alienists' research generally buttressed Guizot's perspective.;Jules Michelet demonstrated, in answer to the conservative approach of Guizot, that the people would revolt against their own emotional pain. Neither Guizot's bourgeoisie nor Blanc's revolutionary vanguard would be needed to achieve national fraternity. Michelet was atypical in suggesting that insanity was a positive force. He believed in the autonomous role of the populace at a time when Guizot and Blanc trusted in the ability of political leaders to improve society by following scientific prescriptions, if need be, against the will of the majority. While Guizot's and Blanc's partisan employment of psychology often divided the nation, Michelet demonstrated that the label of insanity could also be used as a cry for national unity.